With an expansive county road network, Crawford County road officials work year-round to keep the system in good shape.

The system covers 640 square miles with more than 1,110 miles of road, 150 bridges and many box culverts, and always with a road crew out on job.

Road work in the county is determined by traffic count, and the county tries to address repairs to one road per year to each judicial district, officials said.

County Judge John Hall explained that the department divides up its road projects by season, devoting the winter months to regular maintenance on the nine zones in the county and performing the bulk of its base-work and building in the spring and summer.

“We have ongoing widening and maintenance projects and usually have four to five crews working on different projects within the county year-round,” Hall said, noting that the county uses about 200,000 tons of gravel annually for maintenance.

The landscape of the county’s road system has changed dramatically since Hall took office in 2006, but money controls the projects it can do.

“We’ve totally changed and improved the system,” Hall said. “The trouble is, if we want to continue to do these projects, we have to continue to find grant money and funding sources without tax increases on the public. The public has bought into the improvements and we want to maintain that level of service.”

The road department employs 34 full-time employees, each with benefits, and operates on a $5 million budget, which Hall says rarely fluctuates. He said the department has had the same amount of funding for seven years and is not seeking new funding.

“The budget doesn’t really change much, and the funds can’t be dispersed elsewhere,” Hall said, adding that the county owns all of its equipment, including eight semi-trucks, bulldozers, and brush-cutters and -hogs, with the exception of road graders, which the county leases.

While performing year-round maintenance is the priority, Hall said the county would like to pave as many roads as possible, with the eventual goal to have 90 percent of all public roads within a quarter-mile of a paved roads.

Replacing the low-water bridge over Pevehouse Road will be the department’s biggest project next year. The county and the city of Van Buren will work together on the bridge, and received a disaster relief funding grant from Federal Emergency Management Agency for the project, in which the county will contribute $150,000. Hall said the project is scheduled to begin upon the completion of Rena Road construction.

The county paved 17 miles of road this year, with plans to pave an additional 15 next year, including asphalt overlay to portions of Pine Hollow, Red Hill and Shipley Roads.

Road foreman David Burkart said the biggest challenge is the unpredictability of weather and weather-related disasters.

“We prepare our roads to prevent disasters,” Burkhart said. “We have chip-and-seal and full-time maintenance projects occurring all the time in an effort to keep the roads safe. Sometimes, big, heavy rains can set our work schedule back. A lot of our projects are designed for preventative damage.”

Hall said he hopes that the public will continue to support the work the department does.

“We are doing the best we can with what we’ve got and we hope the public will see it that way,” he said. “We’re always busy. The system is large and complicated and always needs maintaining. A nice road is a world of difference, and that’s the whole idea of this.”